


The Ballad of Sweet William and the Ghost

by Lilliburlero



Category: Ghosts (TV 2019)
Genre: 1990s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Dream Sex, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oral Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Canon, Queer History, References to Drugs, Sex Work, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:48:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28067277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: In 1994, Havers returns to Button House. It turns out to be a rather fateful weekend.
Relationships: The Captain/Lieutenant Havers (Ghosts TV 2019)
Comments: 32
Kudos: 61
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [libraralien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/libraralien/gifts).



> ~~While I was writing this fic I discovered that the 2020 Christmas special will almost certainly ~~joss it to high heaven~~... ah, that is, make it a canon divergence AU before Yuletide even opens, but I hope you enjoy reading even half as much as I did writing. ~~  
> Just watched it, and it didn't!

‘Huntingdon 798?’ He must, he thought to himself habitually, try to break the habit of answering the telephone like that. It sounded _Palaeolithic_ : the number had been six figures for about a decade.

‘Hullo, Bill. How are you?’ 

‘Peggy! Mustn’t grumble. To what do I owe the pleasure of daytime rates?’ 

He fancied he could actually hear her blush for the extravagance. ‘Well, it’s _important_. Remember I said Lady Heather Button is the President of our W.I. and it was the A.G.M. last week so I just screwed my courage to the sticking place and marched right up and came out with it because faint heart never won fair et cetera, looking back she must have thought I had a hell of nerve, she’s frightfully frightfully and still always wears a pillbox hat with an eye-veil and gloves, I think that’s a bit much, don’t you? But anyway she practically bit my hand off, I should have known really, she drives an Allegro that looks old enough to hold a driving licence of its own, I expect it’s the roof, or the drains, drains are such a _drain_ and I know it’s a bit out of the way but not as much as you’d think, if you don’t fancy driving you can get off at Welwyn and take a minicab, and there’s a little branch line that Mr Beeching didn’t get his hands on for the Manchester contingent, astonishing really, two trains a day from Watford Junction, Higham Halt, perfectly timed, and it’s so much nicer than that _grotty_ community centre for _half_ the money, and it's overnight, so I can have a little tipple for _once_ —and so, to cut a long story short, _will_ you?’ 

‘My dear, you lost me around about pillbox hat.’ 

‘Button House, Bill, do keep up. I’ve booked it for the Caravanneers’ reunion in the spring, only provisionally, weekend of the 18th of March, fully refundable dep—’ 

‘Button House? Near Chetwynd Parva? Well, blow me down—I _know_ Button House. I was stationed there right at the beginning of the w—hang on, what’s the snag?’ 

‘Snag?’ Peggy’s voice rose an innocent half-octave. 

‘Yes. There must be one, or you’d just have gone ahead and confirmed it, Madam Treasurer.’ 

‘We—el. We haven’t got it _quite_ to ourselves. That’s why the cut rate. But they’ll be in the other wing entirely, the place is enormous, and they’re not really there-there, I expect we won’t see them at all, but I know if anyone can talk Andrew out of organising a _picket_ or something, it’d be you.’ 

‘Picket—oh lor’. Who are “they”, and what’s “there-there”?’ 

‘Oh, some defence industry bods. They’re not Lady Heather’s guests, properly speaking, she just agreed to take some overflow for her neighbour. They’ll be up at his place for all the social stuff.’ 

‘Peg—are you _sure_ this is a good idea? If they get wind of what _we_ are, or the local rag—I could see it being a bit of a scoop for an ambitious cub reporter, arms dealers and—us shacking up at Lady Bountiful’s country pile—’ 

‘They won’t, will they? None of us exactly camp—I mean, frisk about. They’ll think we’re just a bunch of Dormobile and Winnebago enthusiasts.’ 

‘Without an actual caravan to our name. All the same, I—’ 

‘You know I said _fully_ refundable?’ 

‘Not?’ 

‘Not.’ 

‘As in, not even a little bit refundable?’ 

‘Mm.’ 

‘I’ll get on the blower to Andrew right away. We might be able to talk him down to just the CND tee-shirt—maybe a teeny-weeny placard—’ 

It wasn’t until that afternoon, when he found himself quite uncharacteristically flummoxed not only by the final conundrum but both the arithmetic problems on _Countdown_ , that Bill thought to ask himself whether going back to Button House after fifty years was something he actually wanted to do. The daft name of the place was synonymous with the sillinesses of the Phoney War, as other names—Gazala, Mersa Matruh, Tobruk—meant the real bloody awful thing. And yet it was at Button House that he had made the series of irrevocable recognitions and determinations that had led him to a fuller life than he had imagined possible, and to the company he now kept. It would be circling back to a point of origin, and that was undoubtedly satisfying. He could just wish it didn’t feel quite so damn _haunted_.


	2. Clubs!

I hesitated at the far end of the narrow attic passage. The new bug had wedged himself into one of the curious little recesses that were, I suppose, once meant to be passing places for dozens of servants scurrying back and forth. Along with the khaki shorts and the woggle, the posture made him look even more like an actual bug, a woodlouse or an earwig or something. Perhaps he just wanted to be left alone to get over his—feelings. He really should’ve been past all that, but sometimes—well, one knew how it was. There was a certain sort of wet November afternoon that was far worse than First Night at school, and three weeks into basic training, when the shock had worn off—how long had he been here now? Eight, nine years? Not that there _was_ duration, exactly, any more, or rather, there was nothing _except_ duration, which came down to the same thing in the end, but anyway, this was probably roughly the equivalent of the mid-term blues. Well, then. One didn’t like to get a reputation for chivvying, but as ranking officer, I felt I had a duty.

‘Hullo there. Butcher, isn’t it?’

This overture was not met with the entire gratitude of a third-form twirp condescended to from prefectorial Olympus, nor the uncertain hardiness of a recruit for whom an officer’s attention can only mean bad news. Frankly, he looked at me as if I were soft in the head. ‘You already know my name,’ he said. ‘And you can call me Pat.’

‘Of course. Mind like a sieve,’ I rallied. ‘This place, you know, hard to keep track. Always something. Never a dull moment.’

‘Really?’

‘Really what?’

‘Never a dull moment. Because it seems to me like there’s nothing but.’

Golly. Well, there it was. He was right, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking there wasn’t something not quite—not quite— _quite_ about actually saying so.

‘Well, I daresay it seems like that, a well-oiled machine doesn’t draw attention to itself, but a lot of work, a lot of work goes in—’

He straightened up in an openly sceptical, almost insubordinate fashion.

‘Anyway,’ I added, quickly retrieving the situation, ‘just wanted to check you were settling in all right and all that sort of thing. I’ll leave you to—’

‘’Spose so. How long did it take you? Y’know, to feel like you weren’t the new boy any more?’

I really didn’t like to say, because the honest answer was _not until you showed up_ , which wasn’t very comforting, given the rather sparsely populated nature of the old billet. The best he really had to hope for was Lady Heather toppling off the perch, and she looked like the sort who was dug in for her telegram from Buck House, and then probably headed straight to the Choir Celestial. She would think getting stuck on this intermediary plane was just frightfully wet of one, lacking the appropriate gumption and so forth, and in my glummer moments, I had to say, I didn’t disagree.

‘Because,’ he continued, shoving his hands defiantly deep in his pockets. ‘I’ve got some ideas. To liven things up a bit, or at least to pass the time. But I don’t want to tread on anybody’s corns—’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ I said airily, though I had my private reservations that our merry band would accept anything this funny little man had to propose. ‘What?’

‘Clubs.’

‘Clubs?’

‘Clubs. You know, like—’

‘—golf clubs?’

‘No,’ he said with what I felt was a slightly unnecessary exasperation, ‘we’re d—’

‘—suit of clubs, then. Bridge.’

‘No—we can’t move things—how would we play cards? I mean. Film club. Food club. Music.’

‘But we’re d—’

‘I mean. We get everyone together. In a circle. And we just—talk. About the food we’d eat, if we could. Or, I dunno, the clothes we’d wear, or sing a song.’

‘But that’s impos—actually, it isn’t, is it? It’s really jolly good. Inspired, even.’ I warmed to the theme. ‘Yes, I’ll call an E.G.M., and I, I mean, we can propose it—you’ll second me, won’t you, Butcher?’

‘Pat. And,’ he added, with a sort of bandy-legged obstinacy that was not really among his more attractive traits, ‘I think you’ll find it was _my_ idea, and you should be seconding _me_ —’

But just at that moment came a sound not heard at Button House for many years, the growl of engines much more powerful than that belonging to Lady Heather’s 1100cc Austin. I spun on my heel, and together we leapt to the dormer window.

* * *

‘Right, now, look here. We’ve got not one, but _two_ incursions on our hands this weekend. Butcher—’

‘Pat—’

‘ _Patrick_ here has gathered an awful lot of gen, thank you Patrick. And what we’re looking into, essentially, is a classical two-pronged attack. Prong One: closing in from the West Wing, we have a fellow from the War Office—’

‘The Minister for Defence Procurement—’

‘—and some munitions chappies—’

‘British Aerospace. Weapons manufacturers and salesmen, basically.’

Thomas was observed to sit up a little straighter. ‘Well, that could be interesting. I do miss my Manton side-arms: they had a rather adorable little pineapple finial on the trigger plate—’

‘Not _pistols_ , Thomas. Missiles. Fighter jets.’

‘That’s right. Pretty serious stuff. Jolly powerful. And Prong Two—what was Prong Two, Patrick?’

‘Erm, someone Lady Heather knows from the Women’s Institute is bringing her caravan club.’

‘So there we have it: West Wing, minor political celebrity and lots of splendid glossy catalogues with rather spiffing materiel, and East Wing, economical self-catering for all the family in West Wales.’

‘So what?’

‘I beg your pardon, Mary?’

‘What have this,’ Mary repeated at a pace and volume suitable for dogs and small children, which I thought a bit rich considering, ‘to do with we?’

‘Us. W-w-w-w-well, they might be. Bathrooms. Beds. So on, so forth. Logistics.’

‘I don’t cares to be spying on the naked Livings, not since Annie got sucked off. It be no fun on your own,’ Mary grumbled.

Lady Fanny made a vinegar face, but added, rather perfidiously, ‘I can’t condone Mary’s deplorable penchant for voyeurism, Captain, but she has a point. We’ve proved over decades now that we’re quite impotent. People come, people go. There’s really nothing we can do.’

‘Me make little suns go phut.’

‘Yes Robin, but they just think that’s the electrical wiring. And since most of it hasn’t been replaced since George and I installed it in 1906, it usually _is_ the electrical wiring.’ Fanny patted her hair. ‘I occasionally show up in a photograph, I understand.’

‘There do be my burnings.’

‘A faint whiff of smoke in a house with over thirty fireplaces. It’s not really sublime terror worthy of “Monk” Lewis, is it?’ Thomas scoffed.

‘I think it’s _nice_ to have people to stay,’ said Kitty firmly. ‘I do prefer it when they’re ladies, though, and I can pretend we’re getting ready for a ball together, or telling secrets under the covers.’

‘Very well,’ said Fanny, ‘if you haven’t got anything else, gentlemen—’ she rose and dusted down her skirts. The others began to drift away.

Patrick turned to me incredulously. ‘Aren’t you going to—well, actually, folks, the real reason we called this meeting was—I had an idea, that we might—Guys! Guys! People—’ He scampered after them.

‘Never mind, mate.’ I jumped to see Sir Humphrey’s head wedged precariously under the double chin of an eighteenth-century magnate’s marble bust. ‘The first century’s the worst. Then you just settle down to wringing all the pleasure you can out of any scrap you’re thrown.’


	3. The Tour

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content note: very brief mention of HIV/AIDS

‘But—but, I remember this!’ Bill exclaimed. ‘Except, of course, that was all covered with—and all of those were in—and none of this was—and, my word, what a bore I’m being. It’s just astonishing, how much can change, and still seem the same.’

‘You could be talking about my life, my dear,’ Cynthia drawled. ‘From Stately Homo of England to Jam and Jerusalem: My Journey.’

Peggy elbowed her girlfriend’s hip. ‘She refuses to come to the W.I. for years, and then swans along to the Ag. Show and wins first prize for the best Sussex Pond Pudding the judge said she’d ever tasted—’

‘Catering Corps, sweetheart.’

‘Why don’t you give us an actual tour, Bill?’ Dev suggested. ‘While we wait for Len and Peter to get here.’

‘Only if we can be sure there are no long-range ballistic Tories haunting the corridors,’ Neale said.

Andrew, who had in fact confined himself to a badge depicting a crushed missile held in a clenched fist on the collar of his donkey jacket, squeezed Neale’s shoulder. ‘We’ll easily face them down. Wretched coward, your average Jingo type.’

‘They’re out clay pigeon shooting and then having dinner at Chetwynd Manor. They won’t be back until bedtime.’ Peggy said. ‘Go on, Bill. Show us the sites of your disreputable youth.’

‘Hardly. It was all pretty, um, buttoned up—’

They groaned in unison. Bill shook his head, still, after all these years, amazed at the strokes of chance, the various efforts, that had brought, and kept, them all together. A lot of people still had their units, of course—service created bonds that didn’t just dissolve at demob. But the Caravanneers—named partly for the North African service they all shared at one remove or other, partly for a nightclub that no surviving member, had, to Bill’s knowledge, ever actually been to—were something different, something, well, _queerer_ , which wasn’t to underestimate how queer a Forces section could get, given luck and a following wind. They came from different regiments, battalions, even services: their connections were of the odd type that characterised lives like theirs, three parts evanescence to one part indomitable organising—a chance meeting on a train, an acquaintance of an acquaintance of a former lover’s former lover, a pub where you’d be sure to find others _of like mind_ , ring-this-number-and-tell-them-I-sent-you. And yet they’d held, longer than most marriages, through governments Labour and Conservative, through the dissolution of an Empire, through social change for better and worse that scarcely any of them could have imagined half a century ago. Asked why, none of them could really say—they didn’t meet or speak, sometimes, for years, yet they had never lost touch, and it was far too late to do so now.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’ll follow me through to the Great Hall…’

* * *

The party in the West Wing proved a very great disappointment. Though of about my own years (which meant, I reflected, that they must have been in napkins about the time that I took up my final residence here—does one ever get used to that, I wonder?) they filled the corridors with schoolboyish hullaballoo, shouting from room to room as they changed into tweeds and shooting jackets. The subjects were not congenial: rugger (never my game), automobiles mostly of Teutonic manufacture (not that I minded that in itself, times change, I’m not a _bigot_ , but Patrick, usually so helpful in bringing one up to date, was inexplicably ‘not speaking to me’), and _women_ (heard it all before, quite enough for a single lifetime &c. &c.) They didn’t leave behind anything interesting to look at in relation to their ostensible business, just clothes strewn deplorably on chairs and beds, soap scum and hairs in the washbasins, and a choking cloud of effeminate aftershave perfume. I trailed towards the front staircase, thinking disconsolately that I might at least warn Lady Fanny that the West Wing was probably no go for a bit, if she wanted to keep her sensibilities un-outraged.

As I turned the corner on the first-floor landing I heard voices— _living_ voices, with that enviable resonance and depth that comes from actually having lungs and vocal cords, moving air around and so on. These were rather elderly, breathy and cracked—of course, the other party. I couldn’t imagine they’d be of much interest, but beggars, choosers and all that. I followed them through the vestibule and into the Hall.

I saw five people at first, all with their backs to me: three men and two women. The first was Indian, middle-sized and wearing unremarkable twill slacks and jersey, the next taller, and what we would in my day have called ‘artistic’: open-necked shirt, corduroys and soft sports coat. The third was garbed more or less as a dustman: steel-toecapped boots, denim jeans and labourer’s jacket, the collar of which was covered by white hair. One might have expected the face of a thug, but his slight turn revealed a heavily-lined, but dignified profile. The two women were clearly close friends, as they stood arm in arm, but comically, there was a clear foot’s difference in height between them: the little one in neat coat and skirt, her hair pinned in a librarian’s grey bun, the tall one glamorous in the Dietrich style, with wide-legged pants, silk blouse and obviously, though tastefully, platinum-tinted hair. She and the dustman hid the figure of a sixth, who was talking; not about vehicular holiday residences, either.

‘…I’ve never told anyone about what I did here, and I do feel like I oughtn’t to be telling you, even now. It was all was so terrifically hush-hush: every morning I had to stand just about— _there_ and give a security briefing, with the most dire warnings about the penalty for any loose chatter down the Chetwynd Arms. But at the same time it was oddly amateurish and Heath-Robinson, you know. We were a small unit and of course nothing had really happened yet, as such…’

One cannot, of course, feel. One has nothing to feel _with_. But when I say I froze to the spot, I mean an icy javelin seemed to enter me at about solar plexus level and pin me to the doorframe, and then a fiery bolt descended through the crown of my head right down to—well, as far as it would go, if I had any. It couldn’t be. And yet for all age had strained and squeezed it a little, I would know that voice anywhere, gentle, measured and genial, the balm of my harassed days and the torment of my lonely nights—I mean. It couldn’t be. My letter and postcard had been returned Died Of Wounds. And that was that. One simply had to get on with things, and there were so many things to get on with, that one simply did. But mistakes were made, especially in the hectic heat and dust of the desert. And if, by some lunatic off-chance, he’d lived, discovered the snarl-up, and cared enough to enquire, by the time he’d managed to track it all down, I would in all likelihood, myself, have been—in fact, not a clerical error.

The small group parted, and then there could be no mistake. But by God, he was an old man. How could he be otherwise—and yet it was a shock almost impossible to wear: he was fixed in my mind in the prime of life—upright, lean, athletically handsome. He must’ve been over eighty—who was I kidding? His birthdate was stamped on my memory as it was on the personnel file that I’d looked at for the last time in June 1940: 11th April 1912. He was exactly three weeks shy of his eighty-second birthday: bald as a coot, bespectacled, liver-spotted, stooped, he leaned on a walking-stick in heavy earnest: the fingers curled around the handle were puce and shiny with rheumatism. But the kindness in his smile was unabated; his brown eyes behind their bottle-bottoms still had the acuity of good sense and the warmth of good nature. For a moment they met, gazed into—through—mine.

I lurched forward with an inarticulate groan. For a fraction of a second, a hope had leapt up that somehow, by some miracle, he might be able to see me. It was ridiculous. Nobody could see us. Not in the—not when we were actually there. Lady Fanny was ridiculously vain of her capacity to imprint upon photographic surfaces, and Robin swore blind that once a bear had seen him, when there were still wild bears in England, but it wasn’t a bit like stories. No-one could see or hear us, however we tried, however strong the connection in life.

‘…it sounds potty, I know, but a version of it was what the Cockleshell fellows used, and after I left they developed one with a half-pound charge that you could pop in a coat pocket—SOE got quite a lot of mileage out of that. Anyway, we were always supposed to be getting these up-to-the-minute components from the Yanks, except the U-boats kept sinking the ships that were bringing them, so we became the most devious improvisors.’

I found myself nodding and tagging along as they moved towards the farther door of the hall. He was still the solid, unshowy raconteur that I remembered, with the gift of telling a story in sequence first time, with no omissions or backtracking. His reports were things of beauty, like h—but it could do no good to think like that, especially now.

‘…a toy magnet from the ironmongers was every bit as good as anything General Electric could make anyway, and the prototype rigid body was a Woolies mixing bowl. The local tinsmith taught us how to retain the magnets on the bowls, but then we had to figure out how to activate the detonator with a predictable time lapse. Stumped us for weeks, that did, and then one little ATS volunteer, quite a kid, she couldn’t have been more than seventeen, left a half-sucked sweet on the workshop bench. Well, I thought the Captain would tear a proper strip off—’

(It _was_ thoroughly revolting, in point of fact, but when I saw the terrified whey face of the poor Geordie creature, hundreds of miles away from home for the first time in her life—I’m not an utter tyrant, you know.)

‘—but it gave him one of his brainstorms, and sure enough, an aniseed ball was the only thing that dissolved at the steady rate we needed, and now we go up these…’

The Indian fellow took his arm to help him up the rear stairs. ‘Thanks, Dev,’ he said as they reached the top, and I thrilled faintly, as I had back then, when he spoke of his civilian life, to know even such a mundane detail as the name of one of his friends.

‘Now, where was I?’ he caught his breath. ‘Oh, poor Edna’s aniseed balls. Well, once we’d worked that out, we needed a casing to keep the detonator dry until it was ready to actuate. And that brings me to the site—through into this day-room, that’s right—of the greatest scandal to fall upon Button House since—

‘Sir George Button shoved his wife out of a top-floor window and pushed off to Capri with the butler and the groundsman?’ suggested the artistic chap.

‘Goodness me, Neale, did he really?’

‘Mmm. Well, nothing was ever proven, of course. The County set closed ranks and it was all put down as a very nasty accident. But he never returned to England for fear of arrest—there was a documentary short at the LLGFF last year—’

Well. _Well_. WELL. That put a certain—complexion on—I felt my cheeks redden despite having no blood, or cheeks, properly speaking, for that matter. Of course, I would never _breathe_ , Lady Fanny’s secret shame was safe with me. But it did explain a jolly lot.

‘…this was the C.O.’s office. You have to imagine it plastered with public information posters, noticeboards and rotas, a filing cabinet and a desk just—so.

‘They tried out a good few things as the detonator casing, but the most promising turned out to be a French letter. The young bloke who came up with it thought it was too impossibly indecent for the ears of commissioned officers, and so the O.R.s in the workshop drew up a sort of rota to get a supply to experiment with: one would go to the chemist whenever he had a pass and one to the barbers, and so on and so forth, and ask for as many somethings for the weekend as they thought they could get away with. They were all from big towns, and they really hadn’t reckoned with village life. Rumours started to circulate about horseplay up at Button House, which quickly spiralled into the most imaginative accounts of orgies. The C.O. and I were blissfully unaware of all but a certain atmos. in the post office and so on, which we just put down to the extra strain that even quite a self-contained requisition puts on amenities in such a tiny hamlet, until the grapevine stretched its tendrils as far as the shell-likes of the ATS Commander at…’

My vitals—or whatever one has instead of—fairly shrivelled. Deputy Company Commander Redmond. Ghastly woman. Schoolmistress in Civvy Street, Domestic Science, with all the freaks and megrims of her kind: righteously, chronically averse to listening to what any other human being had to say if it contradicted in the least one of her received notions, positively obsessed by the idea of character formation—I do believe she thought the Wehrmacht had marched into Poland specifically to test the mettle of her ‘girls’—and yet hands-down the worst judge of character I had ever had the misfortune to encounter.

‘…and so one morning I was summoned to the Captain’s office to find him at loggerheads with a handsome, rather statuesque lady whose forthright, speak-as-I-find manner didn’t quite extend to uttering the phrase ‘contraceptive sheath’ or some such. The poor man—I wouldn’t have said he was an innocent abroad, exactly—’

Certainly not! The wretched woman was being _deliberately_ obtuse, even coy. Very vulgar of her: some things just have to be said out plain. Not many things. But some.

‘…but it was exactly the sort of hint he almost prided himself on not picking up on. I can almost see him now— _without a specification of the nature of the “device”, Commander Redmond, I really could not venture to comment_ …’

The dear fellow. Usually a talented mimic, he couldn't 'do' me for toffee: that stuffed-walrus manner wasn’t a bit like—but it was surely kindly meant. I confess it still stung just a little to hear their laughter.

‘…the tricky bit was, you’ll remember these complications, Peg,’ he nodded at the small woman, ‘that while he outranked her, he didn’t technically have any disciplinary authority over the ATS. So when she demanded a private interview with them, he was quite powerless to resist. She made a terrible sow’s ear of it too, if what I was told was true, but luckily the Sub-Leader, who wasn’t as green as she was cabbage-looking—and had, as a matter of absolute fact, been putting the johnnies to their legitimate use with the better-looking of our lance-corporals, though we didn’t know that at the time—worked it out and explained all. I don’t think little Edna quite got a firm grasp on the birds and the bees for _years_ , mind.’

‘You were fond of him, weren’t you, Bill?’ said the tall lady, who had draped herself in a window seat.

‘Yes, I suppose I was. We were thrown together a good deal, being the only officers. He was—’

I clapped my hands firmly over my ears. It did no good, of course. If I were the officer and gentleman I should wish to seem, I should have left the room. But one is, after all, only human, even when one is not, exactly, alive.

‘—a terrific boffin, but he didn’t really value that in himself at all. He wanted more than anything to come over as a martinet—peculiar ambition, to my mind, but no accounting for taste—though it wasn’t his native temperament in the slightest. And as for logistics—well, that was what I was for. I don’t think he was quite old enough to have seen action in the first lot. But you know the type who did, and couldn’t find their feet afterwards, faffed around with patent inventions, dabbled unsuccessfully in chicken farms and made late marriages to improbable girls?’

They murmured assent. ‘Now, hold on a moment,’ I protested, aloud, I think—it’s rather hard to tell sometimes, and it hardly mattered anyway. It was, to put the record straight, a _pig_ farm. Charming beasts. Very intelligent. Too good for chops.

‘Like that, though not the marriage bit. I knew about myself, of course, and I wasn’t _quite_ pure, but my attitude was really still a terribly stiff-necked schoolboy’s: Nature might have played a dirty trick on me, but I was damn well going to prove of use to society, show the normal citizen something, in fact, and if that meant pouring my last drop of blood into some foreign soil, then so be it.’

‘My first was the same,’ said the dustman. ‘Insufferable. And then he dropped me in the most astonishingly melodramatic, scene-y way imaginable. But I don’t think he ever got over it. Thank heaven you did.’

I wasn’t sure I understood all this. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Of course, I’d kept up with the bits and pieces glimpsed in Lady Heather’s newspaper and heard on her wireless. I scarcely knew why: it hardly applied to me, in life or now. Lord Arran and Mr Abse. The growing speakability, accompanied by a demonstrativeness I found frankly distasteful, and a journalistic opprobrium more obnoxious still. And then this ghastly, frightful, _truly_ unspeakable disease.

‘…it didn’t happen straight away. But when I was in the desert, I found myself thinking of him a lot. Once or twice I even wrote, the sort of letters you don’t send. It was contradictory—our companionship showed me something that might be possible, we spent hours in his sitting room, next door, just talking piffle, he had a big leather armchair by the fire, and I sat on the pouffe—on the _footstool_ , Cynthia—but on the other hand I was damned if I was going to spend the rest of my life, however little there was of it, constrained and—closeted, like him.’

I clenched—everything, which is of course, nothing, in my condition, and prayed the kindly Light to pop me off there and then. It didn’t, of course. It never does, not at any point when it would be remotely useful.

‘After the war I tried to look him up, but he seemed to have vanished without trace. But the clerk who did the search for me happened to be someone I got really rather close to, over the years, so perhaps the old C.O. was looking after me, in his way. It would be like him.’

(Let them have their superstitions, I suppose. They’ll find out soon enough.)

‘Oh, Bill,’ Peg said, taking him by the elbow. ‘What a lovely story.’

‘I’ve talked far too much.’ He drew a sharp breath. ‘But I say, one more thing. I think you can see from the window here. It’s a bit overgrown now, but we used to have a sort of kitchen garden down there. And that was where, when news came about the retreat from France, we squared away all the unused components and plans for Operation William. Oh yes, didn’t I say? Well, the coincidence wore thin pretty quickly. Sweet William, properly, in fact—the War Office had a very odd fancy for flower names, though no tolerance for pansies. But we found that too cloying altogether, so William for short. Though we did have a sort of running gag about the Border Ballad, you know, the one where he marries the wrong girl, his true love comes back to haunt him, and he dreams that his bedroom is full of wild swine? We used lines from it as the key for cyphers and so on.

‘Well, when we were locking down in anticipation of a German invasion, we wanted something instantly recognisable, but unguessable, to mark the crates which contained sensitive plans and parts, as opposed to the stuff that goes boom, which had to go in a reinforced bunker, out of range of the house. All the crates were stamped “High Explosive”, you see, as a rudimentary deterrent. And I said what about a pig—easy to draw, quite inscrutable to the casual eye, and the C.O. seemed rather unduly delighted with that, “Excellent,” he said, “charming animals, very intelligent, too good for chops.” So I spent my last hours at Button House happily drawing pig snouts in chinagraph pencil on tea-chests of top-secret files and blueprints. Funny, the things you end up doing for King and…’

Oh no. Oh, Christ no. Chalk, chalk. It was supposed to be chalk! I _told_ him chalk, most unlike him to make that sort of mistake, but I suppose he was excited to be going to the front. Barry—wretched mongrel that we’d acquired somehow or another—had the most deplorable appetite for chinagraph: the rotten cur would lick it off anything, and eat whole sticks if he was let. The grease, I suppose: he used to eat wax candles and boot polish as well, and bring it all rather alarmingly back up. Not very bright, dogs, and not charming, but an Englishman is obliged to be fond of them, one way or another. But that meant that the crates in the stable block, that _I_ drew the pigs on—oh God, oh no—and which had been buried almost butt-up against the north wall of the house, actually contained the explosives. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Well, I thought, calming myself. They’d been there for fifty years without incident, and Lady Heather showed no interest in kitchen gardening, she got everything, tightly swaddled in Cellophane, from Marks & Spencer. It would be all right. Probably. Possibly. Oh, God. But, I thought, I’d better follow this little group around until they leave. Purely for intelligence gathering purposes, of course. Nothing sentimental about it, absolutely not, wouldn’t dream—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jam and Jerusalem: synecdoche for the [Women's Institute (W. I.)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Institutes).
> 
> A nightclub that no surviving member, had, to Bill’s knowledge, ever actually been to: [the Caravan Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caravan_Club_\(Endell_Street\)).
> 
> Cockleshell fellows: the personnel of [Operation Frankton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Frankton).
> 
> SOE: [Special Operations Executive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive).
> 
> Aniseed balls and condoms really did play an important role in the development of [limpet mines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpet_mine). 
> 
> LLGFF: London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
> 
> Lord Arran and Mr Abse: advocates of the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales in the 1960s.
> 
> Border Ballad: [Fair Margaret and Sweet William](https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/boeb/boeb08.htm) (Child 74), sung by [Jean Ritchie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgfRjXOkcM).


	4. A Decent Shag

‘They grew till they grew unto the church top,  
‘And then they could grow no higher;  
‘And there they tyed in a true lovers knot,  
‘Which made all the people admire.

‘Then came the clerk of the parish,  
‘As you the truth shall hear,  
‘And by misfortune cut them down,  
‘Or they had now been there.’

Bill closed the volume—a first edition of Percy's _Reliques_ , happened upon in the library downstairs.

‘There you are, sir. I say, don’t you feel rather for the incidental people in the Ballads: the eldern knights and the bonny bonny boys, and that hapless parish clerk? I always imagine them saying to themselves _whatever did I do to get myself mixed up with this fearful crowd _—sir? Sir?’__

The C.O.’s posture had not changed: for him, one of unwonted languor, to accompany the scandalous déshabillé of loosened tie and unbuttoned Service Dress jacket: slumped in the leather armchair, feet thrust out before him, head leaning on one of the wings. But he was far from relaxed: his knuckles were pale around the tumbler of whisky, his eyelashes damply spiked, and the cords in his neck taut with the effort of self-mastery.

Bill thought it best to look away until this emotional operation was complete, and then, as Englishmen together, they could pretend it had not occurred, thus minutely advancing their mutual intimacy. It pleased him very much.

But the C.O. withdrew an enormous chequered handkerchief, the size of a dolls’ picnic blanket, from his trouser pocket and blew his nose cacophonously into it. ‘Jolly affecting, I always think. Makes one wonder—if there’s a rose for one’s briar out there somewhere.’

‘I fear I’m reaching the age when all I want is a decent shag for mine, sir.’

‘Pfft. You’re a mere infant. This set-up—that institutional odour,’ he inhaled a deep breath of it, ‘you on the ottoman there—rather reminds me of school, doesn’t it you?’

‘Yes. If you told me to go and fill your kettle now, sir, I’d expect there to be a line of other fags at the tap down the hall, and I expect I’d get into a scuffle with one of them, and spill the water, and have to queue up again.’

‘And I’d box your ear,’ he feinted the motion, ‘but only in fun. After you’d made my tea, I’d give you a hot sausage, er, to take back to the fourth-form schoolroom.’

‘I’d like that, sir. I’d like it better than anything.’

The C.O. sipped his drink and gave a smile that Bill had never seen before: consciously charming. ‘I bet you would.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Did you—did you have a favourite?’

‘Favourite what, sir?’ Bill blinked in genuine innocence, thinking of the hoarded wealth of the tuck shop. Then he caught the C.O.’s drift, and blushed, or it might have been the Scotch. ‘Oh no, sir. Nothing like that. It was out of style or something, and anyhow—’ had he said too much? Given himself away? He was committed now. ‘Anyhow, I was different.’

‘You’ve always seemed normal to me. Refreshingly so.’

Well, it’s all relative, sir.’ Realising how that might be misconstrued, he hurried on, fatally. ‘I mean, a certain amount must’ve gone on—boys, thirteen to eighteen, monastic conditions, all that—but it was always done on the understanding that one would proceed to, um, cultivating roses.’ He could still back out of this, he told himself frantically, pretend it had been about horticulture and pipe-smoking all along. The Captain would abet him: they were Englishmen, after all. No-one wanted a fuss. ‘But if you even suspected that you might grow up to twine around—a—a—another briar, it became, curiously enough, quite impossible.’

The C.O. narrowed his eyes searchingly, an expression that Bill usually found comically endearing, heralding as it did some statement of the dazzlingly obvious, delivered with a portentous air of discovery. But he was too agitated now to be amused.

‘Would you like—ahem!’ The C.O. rose with the faintly alarming lurch peculiar to obliviously athletic men who have just passed forty, and suddenly noticed they have _knees_. ‘Would you like—a briar pipe?’

‘I, ah, smoke cigarettes, sir.’ He actually rather urgently wanted one, but the Captain didn’t smoke, and was always forgetting to give permish.

‘We both know that’s not what I meant, Havers.’ The Captain held out his hand, as if to help him up, but when Bill, trembling, accepted it, he did not haul, but pressed Bill’s hand to the front of his trousers, and sure enough, he was at a full stand.

Bill’s nerves drained from him, and slid to his knees, feeling curiously practised and confident. The C.O. fumbled at his fly buttons; Bill gently knocked his hands away. ‘Let me, sir.’

‘Oh, my dear boy. Call me—’

‘I think I prefer sir, sir.’

‘Oh, really? Is that how it is?’ He puffed a little, but Bill could tell he liked it. He found the vent of his smalls and slipped his fingers in: there was something strangely—well, touching— about this moment, when you knew another’s secret parts only by touch. Perhaps it was because bodies—officers’ less than other ranks, but there wasn’t much privacy all the same—were so generally on display in the Army. He savoured it with a couple of priming strokes, then reached further, to the ballocks in their unsettling tender bag.

The C.O.’s breathing was stertorous; he gave an urgent little grunt.

Bill looked up; this foreshortened view should have felt ignominious, but it wasn’t. ‘I can make it—expeditious, sir.’

‘Never—in my life—finished—in less than—’ he gasped, ‘two minutes and thirty seconds.’

‘Another bottle of Johnnie Walker says I’ll break your record for you, sir.’

‘Y-you’re on. N-no need to shake on that, considering.’ He blew through his mouth as if he were about to run half a mile, but with a steady hand took out his pocket stopwatch.

It was the only way it could have happened, Bill thought, as he released the C.O.’s prick from jersey and serge—puerile, gamesome, deniable, so English you could pop a sola topee on it and set it in uncertain dominion over a quarter of the globe. _On your marks_. He was painfully hard too— _get set_ —and wondered if he was going to get his own relief. _Go_.

With an experienced air that felt foreign to him, Bill first worked the tip with his tongue, lapping at the underside, circling wider until the whole head rested wetly between his lips. Then he took more of the shaft, sucking more firmly as he nodded. He buried his nose in serge, which never quite smelled dry again after its first outing in the rain, Lifebuoy (of course), and that mealy, vinegary thing that was men’s loins. _Loins_ made him think _too good for chops_ , and he felt mirth rising through his nose, like an unwise swig of pop.

The C.O. murmured, ‘Dear boy, dear dear, dear boy,’ and stroked his hair with a heavy repetitive left hand. He still held the stopwatch with the faintly exaggerated gesture that he used at morning PT. ‘One minute. Still quite a way off, I think.’

He squeezed the C.O.’s buttocks and rocked back a little on his heels, betraying him into a thrust: once he’d pushed his whole length in between Bill’s tightly hollowed cheeks, he would be hard pressed not to do it again, and with that thrust, or the next, Bill would open his throat, and the dear old fool would be lost. ‘Two minutes!’

The mouth organ gave an astonishing, bleak, lonesome wail. _That’s bending,_ Bird said, _you play the note, but the same time,_ he licked his incisor lasciviously, _make like you blowing a man, not a harp_. But Bird, a staff sergeant with the 1511 Quartermaster Truck, with whom Bill had spent an ecstatic 48-hour pass in late 1943, didn’t belong here.

Someone hammered on the door. ‘Two minutes and t—’

Through watering eyes Bill saw the C.O.’s face contort and flush, from another somewhere else a hoarse voice fluted, _scarper, chickadees, it’s Lilly Law!_ Semen coated his tongue and hackled in his craw.

Bill lay for what felt like a very long time in in sleep’s curious vestibule. At length he made sense of the unfamiliar bedclothes (pink wincyette: who still had wincyette sheets?) and the disused smell beneath a determined assault of furniture polish and pot pourri. Yes, Button House. The Caravanneers. The next thing was to work out if he had a hangover or not. He couldn’t have been such an infernal dolt as to get tight, not at his age, could he? No—there had been two pints of Greene King in the Chetwynd Arms, a glass of wine with the very obviously microwaved lasagne provided by Lady Heather's cook-housekeeper, and a nightcap from the bottle of Glenmorangie that emerged, an Athena from the Zeus’s head of Cynthia’s capacious handbag ( _I showed a leatherworker in the Büyük Çarşı in Istanbul a picture of a Hermès Birkin, darling, and fifty dollars and two days later, voilà!_ ) to accompany reminiscence in the library after dinner. Then bed before midnight, dead to the world. Even the noise that must have been the other party returning from Chetwynd Manor, with, judging by the pitch of one or two of the shouts, some feminine company in tow, had only brought him to the brink of wakefulness. It was all right. It was all going to be all right. And as dreams went—well, he’d had much worse, and quite a few queerer.

He groped for his specs on the bedside locker, sat up and adjusted them on his nose, and saw with the fishbowl magnification of Eighty-Two, not the unimpaired clarity of Twenty-Eight, the C.O. standing at the end of the bed: pale as very death, frowning and leaning forward, his swagger stick clamped in his armpit, as he did when he had some new observation to impart or particular outrage to deplore. Bill would still have been quite prepared to pass it off as a continuation of the dream, had the ribbon bars above the C.O.’s breast pocket not included the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal and the War Medal. They hadn’t been in his dream: why would his brain have suddenly pinned them on a man he’d last seen in 1940?

Bill blinked him away. He was still there. ‘Sir?’

‘How d’you like your bed, Sweet William? And how d’you like your sheet?’ he replied, sounding, as ever, rather exasperated.

Then someone rapped on the bedroom door, and he was gone.

‘Bill? Bill?’ Andrew called. ‘You all right in there?’ There were other voices, some familiar, some not, in the corridor. He caught snatches— _slept through all the drama_ , _the poor chap, quite young_ , _rather a hundred escorts than one Trident—_

‘Yes,’ he shouted back. ‘In the pink. See you in a mo.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1511 Quartermaster Truck: the regiment involved in [The Battle of Bamber Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bamber_Bridge).


	5. Aftermath

Bill passed two uniformed police officers and another with a distinct look of plainclothes in the entryway.

‘Good morning.’ 

‘Hullo, sir,’ said the detective, or whatever she was. ‘We’re asking everyone to wait through there, just for now, if that’s all right. Lady Button’s housekeeper is coming round with some tea and coffee.’ 

‘What’s happened?’ 

‘Gentleman taken seriously ill in the night. Not really at liberty to say more than that.’ 

That meant _dead_ , or the place wouldn’t still be crawling with not-at-liberty rozzers. It couldn’t be Andrew, Bill thought, and he was pretty sure he’d heard Dev’s and Peter’s voices in the corridor too. He tried to keep his breathing even. 

Peggy appeared in the hall doorframe, pale and pinched and seeming even tinier than her four foot eleven. ‘Bill! It’s all right. It’s not one of—I mean, we’re all okay. Come through to the library.’ 

‘You look ghastly, Peg. What on earth—’ 

They passed a small huddle of four men, all wearing the rugby shirts, beige chino trousers and moccasins of the off-duty corporate-governing class, who looked even worse. The other party, of course. It must have been one of them who had—he nodded at them in helpless condolence, then back at Peggy, who shook her head. 

Coffee had been supplied, and Cynthia’s Glenmorangie was circulating again in the library. 

‘Hullo, Rip van Winkle,’ said Dev mournfully, touching his hearing aid. ‘I thought I was supposed to be the deaf one.’ 

‘What went on?’ Bill asked, accepting a seat and a cup. ‘Does anyone know?’ 

‘Oh yes,’ Peggy said. ‘I found him. Oh golly, I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything—’ 

‘I think it’s all right,’ Neale put in. ‘It all looks frightfully Agatha Christie, but I don’t think they’re holding us for interrogation, just trying to delay the inevitable, with the press.’ 

‘Oh,’ Bill breathed. ‘The junior minister.’ 

Peggy nodded. ‘You know how early you wake up at our age. It was just before five, and I thought I’d go down to the kitchen and see if I could scare us up a cup of tea…’ 

‘Don’t—feel you have to, on my account,’ Bill said. 

‘No, it helps to make sense of it. I was just passing the landing where the two wings join, and I heard a thud. Well, it might be _quite_ a few years since I was in an EMS hospital, but I still know the noise of a body hitting the floor, and sure enough, it was this poor fellow, Julian what’s his name, I hadn’t heard of him.’ 

‘Fawcett,’ Andrew said, ‘Minister for Soft Soaping Murder Merchants.’ 

‘Really,’ Len protested. ‘Nihil—' 

‘Spare me the Latin tags—all those people in East Timor are dead as well.’ 

Cynthia rolled her eyes. ‘Cork it, boys. Carry on, love.’ 

‘Well, there he was, at this stage he was still breathing, but unconscious, twitching a bit, quite unsettling. Big chap, I didn’t know if I could manoeuvre him into the recovery position by myself, and I was about to get one of you lot, when a young lady came out of one of the rooms, and you wouldn’t have really thought it from the PVC thigh-boots and the scanties, or maybe you would, really, it’s a line of work where first aid would be useful, I imagine, but anyway, she was very practical, and she took care of him while I went to telephone for an ambulance, and I woke Andrew on my way back. Well, by that time, the poor chap’d had another attack, and now he wasn’t breathing, and Lorraine, the first young lady, had gone to get her friend Dawn who was a first aider too, and that of course had woken the gentleman in that room, who’d started up rather a hullabaloo, _not_ very edifying, I’m afraid, very unpleasant language, and these two poor girls trying to do mouth to mouth and whatnot, and that woke all the rest of them, including the girl he’d been with, and she got a bit distraught. Andrew was very good, but he did have to get quite stern with these ghastly men, and _that_ was when Lady Heather showed up in her housecoat and hairnet. I don’t know whether she was shocked to the marrow or taking it all in her stride, it’s so hard to tell with the County, but mainly she seemed awfully miffed that we hadn’t rushed to tell her straight away so she could direct operations, I suppose that was remiss, it is her house after all. And by this time most of our lot were up too. I slipped the girl who'd been with the minister—Kirsty, she was called—down to the kitchen for some hot sweet tea, and she told me a bit more. There were rather a lot of drugs involved, but the sex bit of it sounded awfully tame and rather sad. Apparently the minister was talking a big game about orgies and all sorts of exotic _positions_ and what-have-you, but she told him very firmly that wasn't in the contract, as it were, so he got very meek and just dropped trou for a quick—' 

Peggy made a gesture not usually associated with stalwarts of the Women's Institute. 

'But he couldn't even manage that properly, so he started _weeping_ about his wife and children and beautiful home, and she spent the rest of the night consoling him, until he fell asleep in her lap, and she didn't get a wink. When he woke up he bounded off in search of more cocaine, and that's when it must have happened, the heart attack, or whatever. She felt dreadful because she'd dozed off as soon as he left and hadn't noticed how long he'd been gone. She's doing counselling at night school, I think she'll be terribly good, but I'm not sure it pays as well. And at about that point the ambulance arrived, thank goodness, and they popped him off to hospital, but I don’t know there’s much hope: he hadn’t been breathing for an awful long time, you know how it stands still, but I would say it was quarter of an hour or so and then the police were there, and they arrested the girls, and Andrew and Len put their differences aside _for once_ and both got quite indignant about that but Lorraine said please not to, they had a very good solicitor and it would only make things worse. I am glad they were so—’ she giggled unsteadily. 

‘What,’ 

‘Well, professional.’ 

‘Well, that explains why that bunch in the next room look so hipped,’ Bill said. ‘One could almost feel sorry—’ 

Andrew snorted. 

‘Almost.’ 

‘Oh dear,’ Peggy sniffed, ‘and it’s all my fault. I dragged you here.’ Cynthia slid down the sofa and hugged her, while the rest made reassuring noises. 

‘Though,’ Neale remarked, ‘it does make the Bethnal Green Road Community Centre look a lot less cursed…’


	6. Epilogue

The ghosts stood in the forecourt, watching the flashing lights of the ambulance dwindle down the drive.

‘The poor man,’ said Kitty, wringing her hands. ‘I hope he’s all right.’ 

‘Sudden apoplexy. As fatal as—’ Thomas touched his side with gloomy relish. ‘Still, at least it was a bit of excitement. Like old times.’ 

‘Excitement?’ Fanny wailed. ‘The reputation of Button House is in flitters—it could hardly get any worse—’ 

Five young women wrapped in tinfoil blankets, their hair in disarray and make-up smudged, emerged from the side door and were led to two waiting squad cars. Mary nudged Fanny and inclined her head in their direction. 

‘What, Mary—oh, _no!_ ’ Fanny’s eyes widened in dismay and she made a noise. Then she made another one. 

‘She tryna summon Moona Wolf?’ Robin inquired, suddenly interested. ‘It two day early, but practice, practice, practice!’ He began to howl in concert, but not in tune. 

‘Guys, guys, guys,’ Pat remonstrated. ‘ _Please_. Right. Now, I know no-one’s going to ask us, and there’s nothing we can do, because we’re—’ he chuckled nervously. 

‘Dead,’ the others chorused. 

‘But just for our own peace of mind, I think, we need to put together as complete an account as we can.’ 

Reflexively, the ghosts opened their mouths to object. ‘New bloke’s got a point,’ said Humphrey’s head from one of the planters flanking the door. 

‘It’s been ten years this July!’ Pat protested. ‘I’m not exactly new—I suppose it’s all relative. Right. Date order. Robin.’ 

‘Bitches. Come up drive—’ 

‘Well, that’s not a very nice way to refer to—ladies who are just trying to make a living in difficult circumstances, Robin, bit of respect there, please.’ 

‘He means Begg-Chetwynd’s hounds,’ Thomas sighed. ‘They follow anything that moves, and they can sort of sense—us? It’s nice, sometimes, bit of a connection.’ 

Robin nodded. ‘Play with bitches. Sleep with bitches in wood. Wake up, all blue light, whoop, whoop, whoop—like go phut, but not go phut—’ 

‘So you—didn’t see anything at all. Thank you, Robin.’ 

‘In this pot all night, mate, to save you the bother,’ Humphrey interjected. 

‘So maybe you saw the taxicabs drive—’ 

‘Facing the wall, wasn’t I? Still facing the wall. Someone couldn’t come and turn me—never mind, don’t want to be any trouble, carry on.’ 

‘Mary. You like spying—well, you tell us.’ 

‘Well, I was there in the back bit.’ 

‘West Wing,’ Fanny corrected. 

‘And it were quiet, until they all came in noisy-like, with a doxy to every man, and one pair on ‘em went straight to it, swiving, and and some on t’others had a little bag of flour, so tiny it wor, like of yay bigness,’ she opened her finger and thumb about three inches. ‘and I thought what would gentry have to be doing with such little flour, you couldn’t make nothings with it, but they pours it out on a bit of lookings-glass, and sifted it, and I thought this is the work of Beelzebub, some sort of magicking, and I was getting to be gone, but do you know what they did then?’ 

‘Yes, I think I do. Cocaine,’ Pat mouthed, tapping his nose. 

‘How peculiar,’ said Fanny. ‘Did they _all_ have a toothache?’ 

‘No—it’s for, uh, fun. It’s—it’s not legal any more.’ 

‘How very illiberal. I don’t know what I should have done without my seven percent solution, and as for George—’ 

‘Thanks, Mary, that’s very helpful. Drug use.’ Pat made a ticking-off-the-list gesture. ‘Kitty.’ 

‘I was in the room with the Japanese lacquer cabinet, and a lady and a gentleman—not the one who had the apoplexy, another one—came in holding hands, and I wondered if they’d just got married, because she had a lovely flame-red bodice on, though it did look like she’d forgotten her petticoats, and she went into the water closet for a minute, and when she came back he was asleep with all his clothes still on, even his boots! But she was wearing boots too, very shiny tall riding boots, so maybe boots are the style for weddings nowadays. Anyway, she got a novel out of her reticule and I read it over her shoulder—it was a Gothick tale from the colonies, about a young widow and her children, who are taken in by her wicked mother, who shuts the children in a garret, and _whips_ them. There was an awful deal of whipping, it was most pathetic! And the young widow has a terrible secret—you’ll never guess— _so_ chilling! We read together until dawn!’ 

‘So you didn’t see anything.’ 

‘Not until there was a thump outside, and the young lady went to look, and so now I’ll never know what happened to the poor girl whose horrid, horrid grandmother put _pitch_ in her hair, isn’t that just the most deliciously _frightful_ thing you ever heard! I’ll wager you’re sorry you were moping about by the lake, Thomas, it really did quite surpass even the one you told me about, with the Caliph, and the Djinn disguised as—’ 

‘Could we, um, return to reality here, Kitty?’ 

‘Oh, yes. Well, I followed my lady into the corridor, and _he_ was collapsed on the floor, and there was a little old lady in her nightgown trying to help him, and she helped _her_.’ 

‘—and, that was where I came in,’ Pat said. ‘OK, thanks, Kitty. Thomas—moping about—’ 

‘—about by the lake.’ Thomas looked at the tips of his pumps. 

‘Missed the lot. Fantastic. And Fanny, now you.’ 

‘Thankfully,’ Fanny began, ‘my regular nocturnal regimen precluded any witness of the defilement by Vice of my ancestral, immemorial—’ 

Thomas snorted and kicked a stone. 

‘Sorry, Thomas?’ Pat enquired. 

‘Nothing. Probably _not_ the time, on reflection.’ 

‘All right. Lady Fanny, too busy belly-flopping out of the current incumbent’s bedroom window. And finally…the Cap—hold on, where is—?’ 

The ghosts shrugged. 

‘A’nt seen him sin last e’en,’ Mary said. 

‘He seemed quite interested in those other people,’ Fanny said. ‘The elderly ones. Come to think, I suppose they were roughly his contemporaries. You should make the most of that, while you still can.’ 

‘You were doing _such_ a good job of being ranking officer, Pat, I didn’t even notice the silly old walrus was gone!’ Kitty exclaimed, clapping her hands. 

‘Thanks. I think. Wait a mo. Is that—that’s not—’ A tall figure with grey hair rounded the corner of the drive. 

‘It certainly isn’t.’ 

‘Then who is—’ 

‘Oh, heavens above, how exciting—I mean, how terribly unfortunate and distressing! He must have expired—in the white and gold carriage!’ 

‘Where’re his britches got to?’ 

‘Bitches? Bitches! Biii—tches!’ 

‘Hall—oo! Can’t see a bloody thing except this brickwork, nice brickwork, but—oh well, find out soon enough, I suppose.’ 

‘Fuck,’ said the newcomer. ‘Fucking hell. I thought I was a fucking goner, for a minute there. Fucking close call, anyway. Stretcher, ambulance, oxygen mask, fucking paramedic chappies swarming all over me, and then, for some reason, I felt absolutely fucking _brilliant_ , like I'd just had a fucking massive toot, and so I got up and walked—hang on, who in the name of fuckety fucking _fuck_ are you lot?’ 

Pat stepped forward with extended hand. ‘Greetings. On behalf of the Departed of Button House, I’d like to welcome you to, er, Button House. I think you’ll like it here. It’s a lovely place, such a lovely place.’ 

His face was composed and friendly, but a more diligent observer than the late—very late—Julian Fawcett might just have been able to perceive, in his cheerful smile, the tiniest hint of the triumph of one who realises himself no longer the Newest Boy In School.


End file.
